March 7, 2013

Prominent scientist Eva Andrei from Rutgers University will deliver a public presentation on the exciting material known as graphene at 3:15 p.m. Friday in Room 200 of La Tourette Hall 200.

Professor Andrei’s work on graphene was chosen by Sciencemagazine as one of the 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2009.

Within the eight years since its first Scotch-tape extraction from graphite, graphene – a one-atom-thick crystal of carbon – has metamorphosed from the poor relative of diamond into a “wonder material.”

“In this talk, I will review the story of graphene and why physicists are excited about it,” Andrei said. “My focus will be on electronic properties which stem from graphene’s ultra-relativistic charge carriers – Dirac fermions. I will describe experiments which employed transport, scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy to gain access to the two‐dimensional world of Dirac fermions, their interactions with each other and with the environment.”

Andrei holds an appointment as a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Rutgers University. Her research in experimental condensed matter physics is centered on the dynamics and thermodynamics of low dimensional systems. Currently she is working on the electronic properties of graphene.